


talk is (not) overrated

by timstokerdeservedbetter



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Child Abuse, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Child Abuse, ish, this is sad but i promise it ends well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:53:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23470483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timstokerdeservedbetter/pseuds/timstokerdeservedbetter
Summary: The five times Martin and Jon don't communicate, and the one time they do.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 4
Kudos: 108





	1. Chapter 1

Martin doesn’t tell anyone about his mum.  


He’s dealt with it on his own for long enough. A part of him has known for a very long time that she resents him. Hell, he can barely stand to look in the mirror at himself without seeing the man from the photographs, the man he used to call “Dad”. His broad shoulders, his mop of reddish-blond curls, the sharp curve of his nose, his dark brown eyes, the dusting of freckles across his cheeks and nose—none of it belongs to him. Even the soft timbre of his voice and his warm laugh are identical to the ones he recalls in the short, hazy memories from his early childhood. There isn’t a single part of his physical appearance that is only his. It all belongs to that man, as his mother referred to his father so often. And Martin hates that.  


So as his mum begins to get sicker and her disdain for Martin becomes more clear, he doesn’t hate her for it. He can’t; it’s hard enough for him to look in the mirror and see the man who abandoned them both. He can’t imagine what it must feel like for her to have to look him in the eye every single day. She’s living with the ghost of a man who couldn’t love her.  


But it hurts. God, it hurts so bad. Every time he brings her a meal or gives her all her daily medications, he can see in her eyes that she hates him. And one day she tells him.  


He can tell she’s having a bad day when he brings her breakfast that morning. She’s on her side, her hand braced on her lower back, a grimace of pain on her face. Martin sighs quietly. For as difficult as she can be, he hates seeing her in pain.  


“Mum?” he asks, his voice soft, “Are you hungry?”  


She mumbles a response, too quiet for him to make out, but he’s fairly certain it’s just a curse word.  


“You need to eat, please, the doctors said so. You can’t take your medications without eating.”  


“Leave me alone, Michael,” she hisses, turning over to face him.  


Michael. His father’s name. It’s the first time she’s gone this far. Martin isn’t sure if she really doesn’t know who he is or if she’s being purposefully cruel, and he doesn’t know which hurts worse.  


Martin winces and says, “No, it’s me, Martin.”  


“Not much of a difference, is there?” his mother grumbles.  


“Please, just eat, and take your medicine.” He tries to give her the plate of buttered toast he’s been holding onto so tightly that his knuckles are stark-white, but she doesn’t take it.  


“Just go away. Please. I don’t want you here. I can’t stand looking at you when you look so much like him.” She spits out the word “him” like it’s poisonous. The sincerity in her voice is so much worse than the words themselves.  


And it goes on like this for so long. That day, it takes nearly an hour and a half to get her to eat breakfast and take her medicine, all while she berates him. And it isn’t an isolated incident. Every few days, when the pain is too much for her to bear, his mother treats him as though he’s his father. It’s as if she’s too focused on the pain to be able to hide how she really feels about her son.  


She hates him. She hates him, and he knows it, and he doesn’t blame her, and he kind of hates himself too, at least the physical aspects of himself. He hates his coppery hair, and he hates his crooked grin, and he hates his stocky build, and he hates the way he laughs, deep and rich, when he’s caught off guard by something truly funny, and he hates the soft edges of his jawline, and it gets to the point that he can barely look at himself in the mirror and he can’t look his mother in the eye at all.  


And then she dies. His mother is dead. The woman who raised him is dead, and her last memories of him are tainted by the man whose legacy has haunted Martin for his entire life. The only thing she saw in her last days was that awful man, the man who walked out when things got too difficult, who couldn’t find the strength to stick around, who left her to take care of a child all by herself.  


The worst part is that Martin is a little relieved. He loved his mother, of course, but by the end it was so fucking hard. Every single day, being compared to his father and watching his mother suffer—it took quite the toll on him. And a sick part of him is glad that that’s over.  


And so he tries to cope. He grows a beard because his father didn’t have one, and he grows his hair out to his shoulders because his father always kept his short, and he starts wearing collared shirts under jumpers with slacks and dress shoes every day, even if he isn’t going to leave his apartment, because his father considered wearing a t-shirt without a logo on it “dressing up”, and he tries to stop seeing his father’s face every time he looks in the mirror.  


The one thing that he doesn’t do in all of this, though, is reach out for help. He’s got a support system at this point: Tim, and Sasha, and, however shocked he is to say it, even Jon. But he just can’t. He can’t open up like that. So he grieves alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is my first tma fic, and it ended up being more of a way for me to vent than anything else. still, i hope you're enjoying it! to cyberbully me or ask me to write you something, check out my tumblr @vampirewlw! thanks for reading!!!
> 
> p.s. yes i named martin's dad michael. it's what jonny sims would want.


	2. Chapter 2

Jon has never been the kind of person who can reach out for help. He’d rather die; he doesn’t want to be even more of a burden than he already thinks he is. That’s why when the nightmares get worse, he doesn’t tell anyone. For one thing, he’d have to explain parts of his past that he’s never mentioned to anyone before, and he’s not sure he has the words to describe it all. Besides, it isn’t an entirely new development. He’s had nightmares for years, and even though they’ve never been this intense or frequent before, he chalks it up to the stress of his promotion to head archivist and the mess that the previous archivist left him to work with.  


And he deals with it. That’s what he does, what he’s always done. He just deals with it, learns to cope, stays quiet and doesn’t cause any trouble.  


_Stay quiet. Don’t cause trouble._ When the thought enters his mind, Jon tries to ignore the fact that it’s his grandmother’s voice narrating it, not his own.  


The dreams with his grandmother are the most frequent. She didn’t really do anything wrong, Jon tells himself. No one would want to have to raise a child like him, difficult and precocious and impatient. Especially not a woman who thought she was done raising children for good. She hadn’t asked for him, so he can’t hold the fact that she didn’t want him against her. But regardless of his conscious mind’s opinions on the matter, his dreams are a different story. He’s eight years old again, back in that house, the cloying scent of the exact perfume that every single old woman seems to wear nearly choking him. He’s just sitting there, on her floral patterned couch, listening as she mutters about how raising a child was so much easier the first time, or how she wished she could actually enjoy her retirement, or how she wished he wasn’t so goddamned difficult to deal with. As nightmares go, it’s fairly tame, but each word cuts like a knife. Literally; with each bitter phrase she speaks, dream-Jon’s skin slices open. His grandmother just watches, wearing that same disappointed expression he knows all too well, as her words become knives, tearing at his skin. Tiny cuts at first, all over his arms and torso, but they build up, and the stinging pain becomes so intense that he wakes with a start, covered in sweat at some ungodly hour of the night. A tiny part of Jon would be amused by how literal his subconscious is being if it wasn’t so terrible to experience.  


Those dreams alone are easier to deal with because he’s used to them. He’s had some variation of that dream at least once a week for years now. It’s the new ones that are really bothering him. In these dreams, he’s completely alone. The actual scenarios vary. Sometimes he's walking down the street and all of London is completely empty. It's like a ghost town. The lights are on in all the shops, but there isn't a single person in sight. He's entirely alone in the world. Other times there are other people, but a thick layer of impenetrable glass separates him from everyone else. Most of those dreams are set in the Institute. He watches as Tim and Sasha and Martin laugh and work together, as they share easy smiles and enjoy each other's company, but they never even glance at him. It's like he's trapped behind a two-way mirror; he can see them perfectly fine, but they either don't realize he's there or they don't care. He screams, calls out to them, begging them to notice him, but they never do. He'd never admit this, especially not to his coworkers, but on those nights, he wakes up fighting back tears.  


And it goes on like that, for months and months. He doesn’t know how to ask for help, so he doesn’t. Story of his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now jon gets to be sad, too! like before, feel free to come yell at me on tumblr @vampirewlw. thank you for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

When Martin ends up trapped in his apartment, he can’t reach out for help. His phone is out there with her, and his laptop is dead. The power is out. All he has is himself and the endless knocking on his front door. It’s just him and the worm lady.  


He wonders when his coworkers will notice. Or even if they will. As the days pass, each spent with him barricading himself in his bedroom, as far away from the front door as he can possibly be, he starts to think they aren’t going to notice at all.  


And he spends so much time alone. Martin is used to being alone; he grew up with just his mom, and he had a hard time making friends at school, so most of his time is spent by himself anyway. But lately, since he got the job at the Institute and met Sasha and Tim and even Jon, he’s gotten used to being surrounded by other people. And now, trapped in his apartment, he is completely and utterly alone.  


He eats so many cans of peaches that he knows he’ll never be able to look at them again when he finally escapes. If you manage to escape, a sinister voice in the back of his mind whispers. He tries to ignore it, but it lingers there.  


The isolation makes him feel worse every day. He assumed he’d get used to it eventually, but as days become weeks, it’s as if the loneliness has seeped all the way into his bones, draining him completely. He doesn’t bother to even pretend to have some semblance of normalcy any more. He spends the last few days in the exact same spot, pressed against his bedroom door, trying to ignore the tiny silver worms squirming under the doorframe.  


It takes nearly two days for him to notice that the knocking has stopped for good. The worms are no longer wriggling their way into his apartment, and the woman is no longer pounding on the door. But still he just sits there, his head in his hands, trying to push away the thought that perhaps it’s a trap and she’s just waiting for him to open the door.  


When he finally works up the nerve to open the door, he sobs in relief. Huge, body-wracking sobs. Right there in the hallway of his apartment building. Because no one is there. She’s gone. He’s safe.  


He tells Jon what happened, of course. He has to, for the sake of the Archives, but he doesn’t tell him everything. He doesn’t mention that for the full two weeks, he got ten hours of sleep total at most. He doesn’t mention that a large part of him had wished Jon was there, however selfish that may be. He doesn’t mention that he thought Jon had forgotten him, that Jon just didn’t care enough to notice one of his assistants was gone.  


He also doesn’t mention how often he cried. The loneliness and hopelessness and certainty that he was going to die had all attacked him at once, and he spent a lot of time weeping, letting out loud, convulsive, gasping sobs. He doesn’t tell Jon about all the panic attacks, gasping for breath in front of his bedroom door, feeling as though his heart was going to burst out of his chest. He keeps all that to himself, especially since it hasn’t stopped, even though he isn’t trapped in his apartment anymore.


	4. Chapter 4

Jon doesn’t know what he is anymore. He doesn’t think he’s human. He knows things he shouldn’t. He has new abilities.  


It starts small. Elias is talking to him about Gertrude, and Jon mentions off-handedly that Gerard Keay worked with her. But then Elias points out that there’s no way Jon should’ve known that. He didn’t just know it, he Knew it.  


It snowballs from there, and he ends up sitting in a cafe, staring at a woman, asking for her story. No, not asking. _Compelling_. Forcing her to share her traumatic experience, swallowing it down, and thanking her like it’s a simple business transaction. What kind of person does that?  


No kind of person. That’s the issue. He’s becoming something else, something like Michael or Helen or Jude Perry, something inhuman. A monster. He misses what he used to be. He misses when his only worries were trying to organize the archive and having bad dreams. He’d rather endure a thousand nightmares than live like this.  


And it just gets worse. He’s grocery shopping one day when he notices a boy, maybe eighteen or nineteen, probably a student. Jon can feel it. He has a story, not a big one, but a story still, and Jon wants it—no, he needs it.  


“Tell me,” he says, standing in front of the boy.  


The boy looks up, eyes wide in surprise. But, just as Jon knew he would, he begins to speak.  


“It’s the door,” he says, “in my flat. It...I swear it hasn’t always been there. It just showed up one day, I guess, about three weeks ago. I came back from class one day and in the corner of my bedroom, right beside my bed, there was this new door. It’s maybe half the height of a regular door, but other than that it looks totally normal. But it doesn’t belong there. I swear that when I left that morning, there was one door in my room, the one leading into the hallway. And then I came home and there’s this extra one. There’s nowhere for it to go, either. There isn’t anything behind that wall. Or there wasn’t before the door showed up. I haven’t gone through it yet. I’m not stupid. But it calls to me. Every time I go near it, a part of me wants to open it so badly, like if I don’t I might die. But the rest of me knows that’s probably a very bad idea.”  


The boy is completely ignoring his groceries now, focused on telling Jon what happened to him. He continues, “I can hear things behind it sometimes. Little whispers, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. And scratching. God, the scratching is non-stop. I’ve been sleeping in my living room since it showed up. I can’t handle all the noises that come from it. Sometimes there’s screaming, but it’s faint, like it’s far away. It freaks me out, but it’s so hard to resist going in. I opened it one day. It was so dark, and it smelled like mold. It was just one long hallway, and I couldn’t see where it ended. Even when I shined the torch on my phone at it, I couldn’t see anything. It was like it swallowed all the light. And I could hear something skittering down the hallway, getting closer. So I slammed the door shut, and I immediately bought a padlock, and I’ve been trying to avoid it since then. But it still whispers to me, and sometimes I can hear it calling my name.”  


Jon can feel it rushing through him, the burst of energy he gets from taking a statement. “Thank you. And I’m sorry,” he says, turning to leave before the boy can ask what just happened.  


The guilt doesn’t hit him until he’s halfway back to his flat. That’s how he knows he’s getting worse. He just accosted a random stranger and forced him to tell Jon about his trauma, and Jon can’t even be bothered to feel guilty about it because all he cares about is the way the statement makes him feel.  


But he can’t stop himself. He keeps chasing that wave of euphoria he gets when he gets a statement, the way his hands stop shaking and he feels like a fog has been lifted from his mind. It’s addictive, so he keeps doing it. He wants to stop, knows he needs to stop, but he just can’t.  


He can’t talk to anyone about it either. Martin doesn’t know what’s going on, and Elias is just glad he’s “feeding their patron”. So, just like with everything else, he doesn’t say a word.


	5. Chapter 5

Martin is somewhat a pro at grieving by now. He lost his father as a child, his mother only recently, and now he’s lost Jon.  


Jon isn’t technically dead, sure. But he’s in a medically impossible coma. It’s been nearly six months, and Martin isn’t stupid. He knows the likelihood of Jon just suddenly waking up, totally fine, are close to zero. So he grieves. He grieves for the man he loved so much, the man who could’ve been more than just his boss and friend if circumstances had been different. He mourns the man he’s been through so much with: worms, hidden tunnels, Sasha being killed and replaced, Tim dying, the Unknowing, and so much more. He grieves the small things, like how Martin used to bring Jon tea when he knew Jon was working himself to the bone, and the birthday parties Tim always threw that they always pretended to hate but secretly loved. He mourns the man he’s spent the most memorable years of his life with, and he mourns hard. There are weeks where he doesn’t go a single day without breaking down. He doesn’t drink tea anymore. It reminds him too much of Jon. He takes new statements, and records old ones, but it hurts every time he does. He mourns for Jon more than he’s mourned anything else in his life.  


The grief makes it easy to slip into the Lonely. Peter Lukas is always there, whispering in Martin’s ear, and it’s easier for him to just let it happen. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone else anyway, not if it isn’t Jon, so he lets himself be consumed by it. He still shows up to work, but he’s not in the archives anymore, so he doesn’t ever see Daisy or Basira or Melanie. And by the time Jon wakes up, he’s so numb to everything that he barely notices. Plus, Jon will be safer if Martin doesn’t get involved. As long as he does what Peter Lukas wants, everyone else will be safe. So he just comes to work alone, does his job alone, and then he goes home to be alone. He lets the Lonely envelop him, wrapping its seductive arms around him, shielding him from the world. After all, how can he be hurt again if he never lets anyone get close to him? It’s safer that way.  


He’s still not stupid, though. He likes the Lonely, but he doesn’t trust Peter Lukas. He isn’t going to lose himself fully. So as Peter’s plan begins to unfold, Martin still fights back. But he does it alone. When Peter brings him to the Panopticon, he refuses to kill Elias. So Peter casts him into the Lonely. It doesn’t really bother Martin. It’s nice, almost. He doesn’t have to feel anything. He doesn’t have to grieve anymore. And he doesn’t have to talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know these are really short chapters, sorry! i hope you like it so far, though! comments/kudos are greatly appreciated!!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just for the sake of full transparency, some of the dialogue at the very beginning is pulled from Mag 159. i'm sure you'll recognize it. thanks for reading!

Jon saves Martin. It isn’t easy. He has to kill Peter Lukas to do it, and that was the simpler part. But it’s worth it.  


It’s horrifying to see Martin like this, wrapped in smoke, his voice empty and echoing in this barren hellscape. He’s so….alone. Even when Jon’s right beside him, he can tell Martin is alone.  


“Martin, please,” he begs, “Look at me. Look at me and tell me what you see.”  


“I see…” he says, his voice ragged, “I see you, Jon. I see you.”  


The echo is gone. And Martin really does see him. He sees Jon; not The Archivist, but the man he loves. He sees Jon, and it makes him sob.  


“I was on my own. I was all on my own.”  


Jon hugs him, pulling him close. Their height difference means Jon is talking into Martin’s chest when he speaks, but it doesn’t matter.  


“Not anymore, Martin. Never again. I’m here. Let’s go home.”  


They leave the Lonely together. They would be holding hands, but that isn’t close enough. Martin takes Jon’s arm, leaning against the other man the whole way. It’s been so long since he’s felt the warmth of another person.  


When they make it to Daisy’s safehouse in Scotland, they talk. They talk for hours, and for the first time, a weight is lifted from both of them.  
Martin tells Jon all about his mom. He talks about how he’s lived in the shadow of his father for most of his life, how he still winces sometimes when he looks in the mirror because all he sees is his father.  


“That’s not what I see when I look at you, Martin,” Jon tells him, a smile threatening to form on his face.  


“What do you see, then?”  


“I see you,” he says.  


Martin laughs at that, a deep, warm laugh, and for the first time ever, it isn’t his father’s laugh. It’s Martin’s.  


Jon tells Martin about his grandmother, and growing up without his mom or dad, and how he still feels guilty that his grandmother had to raise him when she clearly hadn’t wanted to.  


“Don’t do that, Jon. Don’t blame yourself. It isn’t your fault that she mistreated you. You were just a kid. You deserved better.” Martin tells him.  
Jon doesn’t say anything, but he sighs, and Martin can tell it’s the first time anyone’s ever told him that.  


It helps to get everything out in the open. They talk about Tim, and Sasha, and Georgie, and Melanie, and Daisy, and Basira. They even talk about Peter and Elias. Years of neither of them really talking to anyone mean that there’s no way either of them will run out of things to say.  


Eventually, Martin confesses something. He’s blushing, and he pulls at his shoulder-length curls, but he still says it. “You know when I started to really fall for you?” he asks.  


If Martin didn’t know better, he wouldn’t have noticed the way Jon’s dark skin flushes slightly as he stammers, “W-when?”  


“When you believed me about the worms. I was so scared that you’d react the way you used to with all the other statements, and that you’d think I was stupid or crazy or both. But you believed me, and you let me live in the archives. And that was when my crush on my boss started to get more serious.”  


Even with all this talking, Jon doesn’t know what to say, so he kisses him.  


After they pull away from each other, they keep talking, about everything and nothing at all. It’s not going to fix everything, but it’s a start. For the first time in a long time, maybe the first time ever, they’re healing. It’s slow going, but they’re healing. And maybe things will be okay, even if it’s just for a little while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and there we have it, folks! the first thing i've actually finished in over a year! it ain't much, but it's honest work. as before, come find me on tumblr @vampirewlw. comments/kudos are very much appreciated! thanks for reading!


End file.
